00:00:00The Claude Code team have recently upgraded to do's to tasks which is huge news because
00:00:05it means each task has its own JSON file that can be updated and committed to GitHub.
00:00:11These tasks can run in parallel with sub-agents and multiple Claude Code sessions can share
00:00:16the same task list.
00:00:17Perfect for complex projects that have multiple tasks and need lots of sessions.
00:00:22But what does this mean for the super popular Ralph Wiggum loop?
00:00:26Does this make it obsolete?
00:00:28Not quite.
00:00:29Subscribe and let's get into it.
00:00:32Opus 4.5 changed the game in many ways.
00:00:35One thing it can do that you might not know about is its ability to run autonomously for
00:00:39much longer, keeping track of its state better than other models.
00:00:44Which means the classic to-do list you've seen in Claude Code before is pretty much
00:00:48not needed for small tasks.
00:00:50But for longer tasks, it still has a 200k context window, meaning it does have a smart zone and
00:00:56a dumb zone so it will output dumb results over the 80% mark.
00:01:02Check out my Ralph Wiggum video to learn more about the smart and dumb area for a model based
00:01:07on its context.
00:01:08Now at this stage you may grab a tool like Beads which stores tasks inside an SQLite
00:01:14database and puts them in a JSONL file to be committed for version control.
00:01:19The Beads tool is what greatly inspired the Claude Code team to upgrade to-do's to this
00:01:24new task management system which does a bunch of things from storing tasks in JSON files
00:01:30to letting you run them in multiple sessions and much more.
00:01:34But as cool as this upgrade is, it does work a bit differently from Beads and Ralph Wiggum.
00:01:39In fact, let me show you.
00:01:41So here is a planned file written by Claude Code containing three major changes I want
00:01:46to add to a tool called XDL to help you download videos from X or Twitter using a CLI.
00:01:54And for tasks to work you need to be on Claude Code version 2.1.6 or higher which contains
00:02:00these task management related tools.
00:02:03So I'm going to ask Claude to turn the planned file into a set of tasks to complete.
00:02:08And you can see here it's created the tasks, it's added some dependencies so tasks that
00:02:13are blocked by other tasks and it's put them here so it's highlighted in yellow the tasks
00:02:18that block the specific tasks.
00:02:20And if we go to the .claud directory on the root of our machine, we can see a tasks folder
00:02:26with another folder for our project.
00:02:29And if we open it, we can see all the tasks that have been created with an ID subject description
00:02:36and what other tasks block this task, all the tasks that are blocked by this task.
00:02:41And now we're going to ask Claude to run each task in a sub-agent which it's gone
00:02:45ahead and done.
00:02:46So task 1 is being done and so is tasks 8, 9 and 10 since they're not blocked by other
00:02:52tasks.
00:02:53And we can also see up here the different sub-agents working on different tasks.
00:02:57And now that all the tasks are done, I can check how much context was used and we can
00:03:01see only 18% was used because all the tasks were done in sub-agents.
00:03:06But here's something else you can do with the new task management system.
00:03:09If I wanted to run multiple sessions of Claude, in this case in different split panes but you
00:03:14could have them in different tabs or different servers, having access to the same task list,
00:03:19what I could do is run this environment variable, Claude code task list ID and give it the ID
00:03:26that matches the directory of the task list I want to use.
00:03:30So here Claude should have access to all the tasks in that directory and I could do the
00:03:34same in this session.
00:03:36So here I could ask one session to go through the tasks and another session to verify the
00:03:41task has been completed.
00:03:43If I run the session on the left, the session on the right should be able to see the progress
00:03:48of each task.
00:03:49And now that it's done on this side, this session over here can go ahead to verify that
00:03:53the task has been completed.
00:03:55This is actually really cool because you could start working on a task on one machine, stop,
00:04:00commit those tasks to GitHub or whatever version control system you prefer and then on another
00:04:06machine pull those tasks and continue from exactly where you left off.
00:04:10Which if you have experience with Beads, then you'll know this is similar to how it works,
00:04:15but not exactly because Beads stores the tasks in an SQLite database for very fast retrieval
00:04:23and it also syncs database tasks to a single JSONL file, not multiple JSON files.
00:04:29So you can add this single file to your project and share it with your team members.
00:04:33This is also a bit different from the Ralph Wiggum loop purely because of the philosophy.
00:04:39So with the Ralph loop, you have a single prompt and you have a list of tasks and these
00:04:43tasks are supposed to help you achieve that prompt, which you send to the model over and
00:04:48over again.
00:04:49But with this new task management system, you have a list of tasks and you ask the model
00:04:54to go ahead and pick the next one that it needs to do.
00:04:57So it reads through all the tasks to find out which one is next.
00:05:02This is somewhat alleviated if you have a sub agent working on a single task, but if you
00:05:07want an autonomous loop that can go for as long as you want, where the model follows a
00:05:12North Star, which is in your prompt MD file to continuously improve the project, even with
00:05:17tasks you haven't added, then the new task management system isn't for you.
00:05:22There's also the issue of documentation because at the time of recording, all the information
00:05:27about this feature is inside a single tweet.
00:05:30And compared to Beads, there isn't much in the way of a visualisation tool or a cam band
00:05:34type tool to see the progress of each task, but I'm sure the Claude code community is
00:05:40working on this right now.
00:05:42And with all these new tool management systems creating new software, you're going to need
00:05:47a way to make sure you're not shipping errors to your users.
00:05:50And this is where better stack comes in, which gives you a way to track errors on the backend
00:05:56and front end of your project using an AI native error tracker, as well as a status page to
00:06:02inform your users if your site goes down and a great incident management system.
00:06:08So go ahead and check out better flack today.